Judge Aileen M. Cannon, who is overseeing Donald Trump’s classified documents case, has raised alarms with a recent order involving the Presidential Records Act.
Aileen M. Cannon speaks remotely during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on her nomination to serve as a judge of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida in 2020. Lawyers and former judges said they are baffled by an order issued this week by the federal judge overseeing Donald Trump’s pending trial on charges that he mishandled classified documents — and believe her instructions suggest the case will not go to trial anytime soon.
Cannon is presiding over a case involving the first former U.S. president ever charged with a crime, and Fogel said it is not inappropriate for a judge in that situation to seek guidance. Still, he said, Cannon’s order is an unusual way to sequence the legal decisions and she may be putting “the cart before the horse.”Typically, he said, judges make their rulings about the laws at the heart of the case — and then determine jury instructions closer to trial time.
“The PRA is just not relevant here in any way it all; it provides no defense. To even allow it to be argued at trial would create confusion for the jury,” said Barbara McQuade, a law professor at the University of Michigan and a former U.S. attorney. “There is no ambiguity that the classified documents at issue in this case are presidential records,” Baron said. “He wasn’t indicted because he took newspaper clippings. He was indicted because he took documents that were marked as classified.”
The appeals court above Cannon has already determined, on a separate matter that is also part of the Trump documents case, that the former president cannot declare classified documents his personal property. Other lawyers said the legal standard for recusal is so high — not just under court rules, but also in Justice Department practice — that any discussion of attempting to remove Cannon from the case is far-fetched. Typically, recusals occur when a judge has a close personal relationship with someone involved in a case or owns a significant amount of stock in a company involved.
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